Council OKs overhaul of affordable housing

The Santa Fe City Council passed an affordable-housing overhaul late Monday and created a new affordable-housing office. However, the much-anticipated discussion on the Entrada Contenta development and the proposed Wal-Mart Supercenter went past midnight.

Like last week, when overcrowding at City Hall led city officials to reschedule the meeting , three controversial issues on the council’s agenda drew hundreds of people. To accommodate the crowd, Monday’s meeting was moved to Santa Fe High School’s Toby Roybal Gymnasium, and about 500 people streamed in while activists collected last-minute signatures to bolster their positions.

Although in a new venue, the agenda remained the same: the city’s minimum-wage ordinance, Entrada Contenta and a new affordable-housing program that could profoundly change the local housing market.

However, because the issues again drew a large crowd, progress on the issues slowed to a snail’s pace, and by 11:15 p.m., the council had only taken action on two of the three issues — a request by two companies seeking exemptions to the city’s minimum wage, and approval of the affordable-housing ordinance.

That meant hundreds of button- and stickerwearing opponents and supporters of Entrada Contenta — a 265,800-square-foot commercial center proposed for the city’s south side and including a Wal-Mart Supercenter — were in for a long night.

The new housing ordinance passed on a 7-1 vote, with Councilor David Pfeffer the lone dissenter . The measure creates an Office of Affordable Housing in the city government and requires 30 percent of all new housing to be priced affordably to people earning between 50 percent and 100 percent of the city’s median income. County officials are working on a similar measure and expect to begin debating it within the next month. Both the city and county bills emerged from a joint affordable-housing task force.

Under previous policy, builders were required to include either 11 percent or 16 percent affordable housing in their projects. The ordinance also applies to rental properties.

Opponents to the ordinance, mostly real-estate and development professionals, argued that the ordinance could have some unintended consequences .

Long-time developer Walter Chapman said the ordinance would further shut out middle-class families from owning a home in Santa Fe.

Chapman said because the new ordinance would require more affordably priced units, losses in those sales would have to be subsidized by the other 70 percent of a development’s market-priced homes. He added that in order to make money on a project, the market-rate homes would have to be more expensive.

Realtor Emily Medvec said the council’s work on affordable housing might prove futile. “The market will find a way around this,” she said.

In exchange for more affordable units, the city will grant special concessions to developers. Those concessions include waivers of city development and permit fees and density bonuses, which grant developers permission to build more homes on a piece of land than city zoning laws would normally allow. Density bonuses are based on the idea that developers can make up for smaller profit margins per unit by selling more units. “Density bonuses are an illusion,” said Bruce Geiss of Phase One Realty. He said density bonuses don’t make up for losses developers incur in affordable housing.

Supporters of the ordinance said it was necessary to stem the tide of people leaving Santa Fe for more affordable cities like Albuquerque and Rio Rancho.

Anthony Trujillo, a deacon at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, said he was concerned that without such an ordinance his children would not be able to stay in the city.

The Rev. Dick Murphy of St. Bede’s Episcopal Church said he supported the ordinance because it would provide young families the opportunity to live in Santa Fe. Murphy said religious leaders are having difficulty bringing new families into their congregations because many can’t afford to live in Santa Fe.